All criticisms of GMO technology must eventually come around to someone complaining that GMO are not the tools to socially engineer the society that the critic envisions.
I never get tired of using that line!
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In a nutshell, thatâs whatâs wrong with the anti-GMO movement: that nothing is out of bound, nobody ever gets talked off the ledge, thereâs no quality control, itâs just the same blah blah blah year after year.
I donât even know what that means and wonât try to understand it, but FYI, I am not against GMOs at all. I think it is a great tool, I just regret that it has not been used more for fighting specific diseases, rather than focusing on biotech companies forcing farmers to buy their proprietary Roundup or Liberty herbicides even though the Roundup patent has expired and cheaper generic glyphosate is available. If I didnât know better, I would say that Monsanto is driven purely by insolent profit! 
Thankfully the biotech industry seems to have found a good justification with the recent effort on the citrus greening and wheatâs stem rust diseases, which would save crops, farmers and the general population, and is urgently needed given the progression of these pests. Conventional selection would not be able to solve the problems in a timely manner.
I would also note that farmers that used hybridized seeds also canât save seed to replant the next year. Well, they can but they wonât breed true so thereâs little point.
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with people who actually understand such things far better than either of us
Um, thatâs making quite an anecdotal assumption.
You need to stand all the way back and look at the big picture
Yet another assumption. Of course thereâs some environmental damage with solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc.
You should have noticed that I refer to them as more sustainable energy for that very reason.
Now, picture this. You have a nuclear reactor suspended beneath an ocean-going city/village/whatever
Now picture a massively bankrupt city/village/whatever and youâve got the fuller picture.
Do we use a huge amount of resources making inefficient solar panels? Or improve technology so we can get a far greater long-term energy-output per physical resource rather than possibly wasting a lot of them making sub-standard devices?
Thatâs a false argument. Solar is getting increasingly more efficient as time goes on and this is despite the artificial hurdles the fossil & nuke industries put in front of it.
Then thereâs delivery and storage to be taken into account. Graphene may really save us there, because our battery technology needs improvement. We also should be looking into other storage methods (hydraulic for example)
Agreed.
Iâll reiterate my previous point - Iâve never heard of any GMO group or even internet discussion where someone just says âBad troll, scat!â If you want to be a troll and youâve been booted off the professional badmitten forums, the crocheting blogs, and icefishing discussion groups, the one place left where you will never get banned is in GMO discussions which are somewhere near the lowest common denominator of internet debate.
Not to nitpick, but you in fact seem to have understood what I was saying because youâve abandoned your original point.
They might be growers, not showers.
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For one, GMO foods arenât more evolved than anything else, they just are evolving differently. We arenât creating completely new compounds. Two, you think that us humans arenât keeping up? I beg to differ.
You have allergies (no food allergies for me.). I expect that soon we will have the tech to automatically detect if something on your plate is something that you are vulnerable to, and completely customized to exactly what you are allergic to. Although I really donât think that will last long, and one shot/mouth wash/pill/blood transfusion/whatever, and your allergies will be gone for good. The pen that sniffs your plate is liable to be a Kickstarter project in the near future.
You were saying something about not keeping up?
Thatâs an easy one. Grow your own food, grind your own wheat, slaughter and butcher your own animals for protein, make all of your food.
Fortified food is there because the government demands that it be put there. Do you think that putting that iron, niacin, thiamin, folic acid and other ingredients is something that the bakeries and flour mills put in just out of goodness?
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Weâre seeing rather a lot of the âI donât even know what common words mean!!!â gambit this evening,
Iâm just making a note of that and Iâll unpack that one some other time.
they just are evolving differently.
If by âdifferentlyâ, you mean âat a pace thatâs many orders of magnitude faster than that of traditional agriculture practicesâ, then I agree with you.
We arenât creating completely new compounds
Weâre creating foods that present antigens that humans have never been exposed to before. If thatâs not new, then I donât know what is.
Although I really donât think that will last long, and one shot/mouth wash/pill/blood transfusion/whatever, and your allergies will be gone for good.
Hoo, boy. Theyâll have a lot of demonstrating to do before Iâd take that.
Not to nitpick, but which part of âto clarifyâ did you not understand?
Didnât people say the same things about microwave ovens?
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How many people have demanded remedial education about something (not science) so far in this thread after transitioning from self styled expert to someone pleading for or demanding rescue? To my cynical eye it looks like merely switching from one form of sabotage to another, especially since these are not questions about science but just sort of generally acting helpless.
I donât think this forum is necessarily a good place to talk about yourself.
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Didnât people say the same things about microwave ovens?
That they present antigens that humans have never been exposed to before? Unlikely.
Any hybrid food has the potential to produce a new antigen. Any new food you eat has a potential to have an antigen you are allergic too. Before trying a mango for the first time, should you get tested first? People are allergic to non-GMO foods. Even if most people arenât allergic to an antigen, from peanuts to cauliflower, you personally could be. Does that render these other products somehow unsafe? Even if they did a double blind study with 100,000 people on GMO corn and found it safe, you could be that one in a million case where you are allergic to it. When it comes to something like potential antigens that you are allergic to, there is no 100% guarantee.
Although in all of these cases the answer is, âYou most likely will be fine.â I have not seen anything that shows that there is a reasonable risk of GMO foods being dangerousâŚ
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There have been people that claimed they are allergic to specific GMO foods but none of these cases seem to have stood up to actual testing. So far, the threat of allergens seems to be up there with Morgellonâs âdisease.â
Some day someone will die from a GMO allergy, and they will be one of the most famous people in history.
True, but I can explain my logic. The greater my awareness of the subject the more difficult it is for me to form such firm decisions, because there are too many complexities. I assumed from your firm stance that you had lesser familiarity with the subject (not that I see that as a bad thing, weâre not supposed to have to know so many things), and your quick rejection of an ocean-going reactor because of an imaginary bankruptcy (seriously, that was kind of cheap) makes me think youâre not exploring the options seriously before rejecting them.
There are dozens of types of reactor, each of which with their own issues and solutions, surely you donât see a pebble bed reactor in the same light as a boiling water reactor, or a KAMINI reactor in the same light as a 4S SMR, do you? The range in risk, materials, efficiency, power output, production requirements, and waste are tremendous.
And which would you choose if it gave you the opportunity to get rid of a coal power plant? What type? What about a fuel oil one?
Similarly, location is a huge issue, placing a reactor under water in the deep see is very different from on land near a reservoir, and what about that coal plant? Which ones are worth sacrificing? Do we stick with those monstrosities until we can replace entire electrical grids and what about the batteries weâd need for solar and wind? Those also have production requirements.
Youâll note Iâm not saying âItâs all goodâ, in fact Iâm very opposed to nuclear reactors on land at all, save for very few varieties. I am however very eager to get rid of all those nuclear bombs, and I do see nuclear power as a good avenue. Not the only, and not even the best. A couple of technological leaps or new information could enhance my opinion, and if we pull off a good supercapacitor then we may be able to skip a few steps, as that makes inconsistent power far more reliable.
It feels to me like saying âcockroaches are bad and ladybugs are goodâ or âspiders are bad and cats are goodâ Not only is that very limiting, but depending on which cockroaches, cats, ladybugs, and spiders weâre talking about it also may be completely wrong.
In a similar vein, GMO isnât scary by itself, but again there are layers and layers. What about genetically modified food that uses less land and/or water, reducing the need to clearcut forests in third world countries? What sorts of plants are we talking about? Do they have specialized pollination requirements or can they blow all willy-nilly and spread to the local ecosystem? What about hydroponics? Is there a chance theyâll be extremely popular to one particular species of thrip or scale or aphid that might cause another species to have a runaway effect? Are we doing things responsibly or just shotgunning i?
And again, location is HUGE. Many plants we already eat arenât native to the locations theyâre grown in, and that causes problems too, what about a plant that is easy to pollinate manually but is so pollinator specific (water lily style!) that itâs almost impossible to spread?
These topics are COMPLICATED, and weâre already screwing things up horribly as is. Doing more of one thing can mean doing less of another. And I for one want to get away from fossil fuels and wasteful farming practices just as much as I want to get to clean energy and prevent starvation and hunger.
